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Page 9 of 10
Aftermath: The Death Squads
Cornwall was defeated. The death toll on their own side – now numbering 4,000, including the callously murdered prisoners on Clyst Heath – shocked and appalled the population who could now only look on with a burning but impotent loathing. They faced an awful future. Their rights had been torn up before their eyes; a death blow had been dealt to their language and identity; and thousands of families, deprived of a breadwinner, could only look forward to misery and starvation. Worse was to come. Lord Russell had yet to carry out his final order.
Not even the most Anglophilic historian has a good word to say about Provost Marshal Sir Anthony Kingston. Cruel, inhumane, a man divested of common humanity – these are just a few historical descriptions of a man who would have been equally at home carrying out the worst excesses of Nazi Germany. This was the man sent by Russell into Cornwall to carry out the dirty work of the State. Throughout the length and breadth of the Duchy, Kingston’s death squads did their worst: hangings, beatings, forced evictions, burnings, many perpetrated with the variety of sick humour for which Kingston was renowned. How many died at the hands of Kingston and his thugs will never be known; several historians have estimated a thousand or more.
In all, then, the Anglo-Cornish War of June-August 1549 and its sickening aftermath cost the lives of more than 5,000 Cornish people – approximately 10 per cent of the Duchy’s entire population. Such a proportion labels this episode to be one of the worst acts of genocide in the history of the world. No one had yet conquered and subjugated the Cornish: not the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons or the Normans. In 1549, it finally happened, with Cornwall’s people being terrorized into an enforced English state religion, an English state language and enforced English overlordship. The Duchy’s rights of autonomy became ignored and trampled into the dust and have continued to be denied ever since, even though those rights remain intact at law to this day.
No longer were State documents to bear the previously common distinction: ‘Anglia et Cornubia’. Cornwall, up until then consistently shown as a separate nation, was no longer shown as such on maps. Even what had always been The British Sea became The English Channel overnight as the juggernaut of English nationalism and assimiliation rolled over the island’s truly indigenous people.
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